Who doesn’t like kids doing things with their eyebrows to the beat of a funky house mix?  I especially like the balloon solo…

Usually for viral Friday I post up something funny or bizarre.  Today it’s something that is touching.  I saw this over at 1TimStreet and agree with him that it will go viral. It’s not always the humorous or strange that spreads like wildfire on the internet, very often it’s something as human as two sisters giving advice to two others.  This is worth 3:30 of your day no matter what you feel about the recent election.

Letter Between Presidential Daughters

I couldn’t get the video to embed for some reason, but you can click on the image to be taken to it. I would love to know what you think about this.

Last.fm today announced its launch on the Android platform, offering an ‘on-the-go’ music application enabling users to access all the best of Last.fm from their mobile phones. Features include similar artists and genre-specific streaming radio stations, personalized streaming radio, up-to-date concert information and the ability to track users’ listening habits to their Last.fm profile. The launch of Last.fm on Android marks the latest step in Last.fm’s expansion into the mobile music space. The application is available for download through the Android Market.

Last.fm Now On Android

Using the Last.fm application, users can listen to streaming radio stations such as personal recommendations, similar artists, and genre-specific tracks. Users can also share tracks with their friends on Last.fm and stream other users’ stations. The new ‘Background Playback’ feature enables users to listen to Last.fm’s streaming music while accessing other programs, such as email, without interrupting the music experience.

Last.fm users can view an on-the-go version of their personal music profiles that includes mobile versions of Last.fm Charts page and Artist pages, with biographies, tags, similar artists and top listeners, all optimized for the Android platform. Users can access Last.fm’s Events listings to browse artists on tour, search for events, view Last.fm recommendations and view mapped directions to music venues.

“We are thrilled to bring Last.fm even further into the mobile music space with the launch of this app. The Last.fm service on Android enables our listeners to use virtually every Last.fm feature on their mobiles,” said Martin Stiksel, Last.fm Co-Founder. “It truly is a ‘to-go’ version of the site. Last.fm on Android takes the mobile music experience to the next level.”

Last.fm on Android follows Last.fm’s successful launch on the iPhone and iPod Touch last year, as well as integrations with Vodafone, T-Mobile, and the Three/INQ1 Social Mobile in Europe. You can find more information on the app at Last.fm.

Transfer Feedburner to Google

After countless months of watching the slow death of Feedburner, it has finally been announced that it will no longer be an active service after February 28, 2009.  If you use Feedburner to manage RSS and email subscriptions you should log into your account and click on the tiny little link at the top of the page that tells you to transfer to Google now. I did it in just a few simple clicks (it’s helpful to be signed into Google when you initiate the transfer, saves a couple of clicks) and after several minutes everything was finished.

Their FAQ page on Google answers should address any questions you have, like if you will lose any subscribers in the process of the transfer (Google assures us that the answer is no) and changes in the Feedburner API.

I’m glad for the change, I think the service has been lacking for some time.  A quick scan of Twitter of Technorati at any given moment will reveal plenty of complaints like “Feedburner says I just lost over 300 subscribers overnight” and the like.  Let’s hope that Google can stabalize the service on their platform and give us accurate reports.

Mashable Twitter Article

I just wrote a new post on Mashable called “How To: Use Twitter On The Go“, it’s about browser based option for Twitter control, as well as voice to Twitter services like SpinVox.  I think you will find some of the information useful, especially if you live in California and can no longer use your mobile device to type while driving.

Once you check it out, come find me on Twitter and say hi, I would love to hear your feedback.

Although WordPress 2.7 was released some time ago, a lot of people are just now getting around to upgrading their blogs with the latest version of the popular platform.  Now that people are doing this, I am started to get asked questions about why things don’t work or look the same.  One that has come up multiple times recently has to do with links in the comment section fo a post.  After a 2.7 upgrade, many users are noticing that when a person leaves a comment, their URL link in that persons name goes to their URL but with the addition of some garbled mess that looks like “%20%20do-not-follow”, landing you on a “401 page not found” link.  The solution to fix this is pretty simple.

Every person that asked me about this, upon further investigation, was using the Google Analyticator plugin, which tracks site traffic with Google Analytics.  Older version of the plugin didn’t work so well with 2.7, but fortunately there is an update.  If you are experiencing this problem, go to the Google Analyticator page, download the newest version of the plugin (2.3 as of this writing) and upload it to your wp-content/plugins directory.  Problem solved!

I just installed a WordPress plugin that I’m pretty excited about, TweetSuite.  Dan Zarrella announced its release this morning, and I quickly installed it.  If you are a WordPress blogger and use Twitter, I think this is a mandatory install for you because it does several important things.

• A “Tweet This” button is placed at the beginning of your post, much like the “Digg This” buttons that are so popular
• A list of Tweetbacks (mentions and links on Twitter) at the bottom of the post, which act like track backs from other blogs
• Inclusion of several optional widgets, like “Recently Tweeted” and “My Favorited Tweets”
• Option to send notification to Twitter with the publishing of a new post
• Completely self-sufficient code.  It doesn’t pass thru the author’s server or use Javascripts, so it should be pretty stable

This is one of the more exciting plugins that I’ve seen developed in a long time, and it integrated seamlessly with my WP 2.7 install.  Go download it for yourself and give it a try!  I would love to hear what you think about it.

Since @brooksbayne has convinced half of Twitter (including me) to change our avatars to ’80s pics for the day, I thought the video for the day should stay with that theme.  This made me laugh, it’s A Ha’s “Take One Me” only with a catch…what if the lyrics matched what was actually happening in the music video?  My favorite line, “I’m gonna kick some ass with my own pipe wrench”.

Animoto Picture Videos

Animoto, the online mashup service that brags about being “the end of slideshows” has rolled out some pretty neat features for the new year. You can use animoto to create professional looking videos in a matter of minutes simply by uploading a few pictures and your favorite music track, or use the pre-selected music from the Animoto website. If you have been meaning to share the thousands of photos that you have stored on your laptop but haven’t found a good way, here is how:

1. Sign Up
   It’s pretty quick, and it’s free if you only want to produce 30-second shorts. For more involved projects the pricing starts at $3 per video and goes up to $249 for a year long commercial account. If you’re just trying to take some pressure off from the recent weekend road trip that everybody wants you to publish, the free account should work just fine. If you are going to make more than a handful of full-length videos over time, at $30/year the All-Access Pass is a pretty good deal.
2. Select Your Pictures
   This is really as simple as browsing on your computer and selecting multiple pictures at one time. The :30 free videos will accommodate about a dozen pictures and make a nice production. Don’t worry about selecting the order, you can change this later.
3. Choose Your Music
   You can upload your own music to Animoto (assuming that you have the rights to publish the music), or you can select a track from their collection. Eight different genres are offered, like Hip Hop, Latin or Indie, and each genre has about a dozen different songs to choose from. Chances are you haven’t actually heard of any of the artists or songs in the Animoto collection, but they are surprisingly good nonetheless. You can play a preview of the track before selecting it an moving on.
4. Final Tweaks
   The last screen you go to will allow some customization of your video. If you are making a full-length video you can change image pacing by selecting 1/2 speed or 2x speed, depending on how you want the final product to feel. You can also choose an image for the video cover screen from the pictures that you uploaded earlier. After you enter some video information (title, description and your name) you click the “create video” button and let Animoto do its magic
5. Publish
   That’s it! After a few minutes of rendering you are published. I recommend looking at the final video to see how the transitions worked out for you. If you want to make some changes just click the “remix this video” button and change or remove pictures, music and transitions. If you think you are happy with what it looks like, you have a lot of publishing options. The easiest is to just keep the video hosted on Animoto and send a link to your friends, but you can also email it, download it, get code to embed it in your blog or upload it to YouTube.
6. Animoto On The iPhone
   New for 2009 is the Animoto iPhone app. It’s free, and it works incredibly well. Pick out the photos you like off of your iPhone’s library, select music just like you would from the regular online service, and let it render. In just a few minutes you have a :30 video that you can email to your friends to watch online. This is a really amazing way to share your vacation pics, and to finally get your parents off of your back because you never send them pictures. You can snap photos, render and email in less than five minutes.

Animoto makes all of your photosharing easy and enjoyable, and with the addition of the iPhone app it is easier than ever to create on-the-fly presentations to share. If you have come up with creative ways that you are using Animoto, let us know in the comments!

Do you want to know every little detail about your tweeting habits? There are a lot of services that show you a lot of information, but TwitterFriends really brings some useful data into the picture.  Not only can you see hard numbers about your frequency, replies, and how you compare to Scoble, you can actually look at your network of friends as it relates to others that you follow.  I think it’s fascinating.  My favorite part? The tab that shows me accounts that I follow that haven’t updated in a long time. I removed about 20 people that haven’t updated in months!

Instead of a full write up I made a quick video.  Check it out, it’s under three minutes.  Let me know if you find TwitterFriends useful!